It is often necessary or desirable to remove contaminants from a bulk gas stream. Sometimes, process residuals must be eliminated from a carrier gas stream, and, in other applications, foul smelling or potentially hazardous or toxic compounds must be removed from a gas stream in order to satisfy safety and/or environmental concerns with respect to a potential or actual gaseous emission source.
I am aware of various attempts in which an effort has been made to improve the efficiency of a gaseous scrubber. For the most part, the efficiency of gaseous scrubbers which are known to me have one or more of the following shortcomings: (a) they generally require an independent liquid moving device, such as a pump, to effect liquid-gas contact, thus making them undesirable in applications where loss of electrical or other power source may be of concern; and (b) they often do not achieve a high separation efficiency in relatively simple equipment, in order to efficiently remove undesirable components from the exiting gas stream. Thus, the advantages of my simple, multiple-weir scrubber design, which may be utilized without an independent liquid moving device, in order to achieve high efficiency liquid scrubbing of an entering gas stream, are important and self evident.